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The Best WordPress Plugins Ever Created Since the Dawn of Time

I know what you’re thinking. You’ve already seen a million “best WordPress plugins” posts this month and you can’t possibly read another one. Trust me, I feel your pain. It seems like every popular website has some arbitrary list of the best WordPress plugins of 2018, 2017, and 2016, on their blog. The thing is, most of them are totally full of crap.

I’m going to say it right now: I hate most WordPress plugins. They’re terrible. They’re poorly coded, hard to use, full of bugs and security holes, and they’ll slow down your website. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed, being disingenuous, or has an ulterior motive (like affiliate revenue).

This Ain’t Your Average Best WordPress Plugins Post

This isn’t just some half-baked list of untested plugins that seem super cool and might make me a bunch of affiliate money. No, this is something much better than that. This is a list of the best WordPress plugins ever createdsince the dawn of time. Alright, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but seriously, I’ve spent a TON of time choosing, reviewing, and testing every single plugin on this list.

These are WordPress plugins that solve real problems and do so in a way that won’t damage your website. I can’t promise they’re 100% free of security issues or bugs, but I can tell you that everything listed in this post is far above average when it comes to code quality, usability, performance, and attention to detail.

These Plugins Have Been Through The Wringer…

All the plugins in this post have poked and prodded by yours truly. I’ve seen under the hood and I’ve even run performance tests on some of the larger ones. They were all installed on a WP_DEBUG-enabled multisite network with lots of other plugins. I looked for potential conflicts, slow-downs, and any obvious bugs.

Sadly, a few plugins didn’t make the cut because of code quality. If I wouldn’t feel comfortable running a plugin on my own personal or business website, it is not on this list, period.

Now, without further ado, let’s get into it! In no particular order, these are what I consider to be some of the best WordPress plugins ever made:

Best WordPress Plugins for SEO

Since I’ve spent a lot of my time working on things related to SEO, it makes sense to start things of with the best SEO plugin of all time: WordPress SEO by Yoast. It’s almost become cliche to even bother including Yoast’s plugin in a list of the best WordPress plugins, but it certainly has earned its place at the table.

Every site I’ve made or worked on as long as I can remember has used WordPress SEO by Yoast. It’s an invaluable tool for optimizing your website’s SEO and making sure you’re bringing in as much organic search traffic as you possibly can.

There really isn’t much direct competition to Yoast anymore, although there are a few alternatives out there. I’ve personally tested all of them and I can say without a doubt that they don’t hold a candle to WordPress SEO. In every aspect that matters, Yoast wins. The team at Yoast is always improving the core features in WordPress SEO so you can use it without worrying about being on the cutting edge of SEO best practices.

Best WordPress Plugins for Caching

Every WordPress site needs to have some kind of caching enabled. If you’re using a managed WordPress host like Pagely, it’s already taken care of for you. If you’re not, then you need to use a caching plugin of some kind. Without it, your site is almost guaranteed to load slowly and cause your visitors to turn around and leave. WP Rocket is a relative newcomer in the WordPress caching space and they’ve taken things by storm.

Before WP Rocket, the best all-in-one caching solution was W3 Total Cache. If you’ve ever used W3 Total Cache, you know what a total pain in the neck it is to configure. If you’re new to WordPress, you could easily lose an entire day trying to understand W3. Plus, if you don’t set it up right, it can actually slow your site down. That’s not what I’d call a good user experience.

In contrast, WP Rocket has very few options to configure. In most situations, you just need to install and enable it and your site will be faster. For a caching plugin, that’s HUGE. Even other more lightweight alternatives like Batcache require some level of configuration in order for them to work correctly. The ease of use and effectiveness of WP Rocket is why we use it all the time and why I’m giving it the new title of the best caching plugin for WordPress.

Best WordPress Plugins for social sharing

Yup. I said it. Jetpack is the best social sharing plugin for WordPress. Now, the WordPress developer community might not agree with me here, but it’s the truth. Don’t get me wrong, I have some issues with Jetpack. I feel it does TOO much, but in reality, most of the features in Jetpack are things that real WordPress users need every single day.

Jetpack Sharing is Simple and it Works

One of the best features in Jetpack is the social sharing module. It’s simple, doesn’t load a ton of crazy JavaScript, and won’t slow down your site. It provides share counts for all the popular networks and if you’re technically inclined you can even extend it to do things like sort your posts by the number of shares. In addition to awesome sharing buttons, Jetpack will also give you access to a huge bundle of helpful, well-coded features.

Personally, I wish the Jetpack developers would reign things in a bit and stop adding so many features to the plugin, but that’s a debate for another time and place. As far as social sharing goes, you won’t find a simpler, more high-performance option out there. In fact, it’s even what we use right here on our own site.

Best WordPress Plugins for Forms

After all these years, Gravity Forms is still the best. Even though quite a few have tried, nobody has managed to tarnish their crown as king of the WordPress form plugins. Just about any feature or integration you can think of already exists for Gravity Forms. You can use Gravity Forms to build everything from simple email opt-in forms to complex billing or scheduling application forms.

Gravity Forms Gets The Job Done. Period.

I can’t think of any site I’ve built over the last few years that didn’t use Gravity Forms. I’ve even tried to stop using it because I don’t like certain nit-picky developer things about it, but I always end up crawling back. The other plugins just can’t compare to the ease-of-use and the countless add-ons and integrations for Graivty Forms.

There’s no free version of Gravity Forms because they’ve never had a need to create one. That’s how good the plugin is. In a market where competitors are giving away free alternatives, Gravity Forms continues to grow and prosper with only a premium option. I really don’t think there’s any more that needs to be said about it.

Best WordPress Plugins for Backups

Backups are tricky. In order for them to be effective they need to be automatic, reliable, and easy to restore. The only plugin that can be considered all of these things is VaultPress. The reason for this is that VaultPress isn’t really a backup plugin. There is a plugin component to it, which can also be installed via Jetpack, but the real heavy lifting is done by software on Automattic’s servers.

WordPress Backup Plugins Don’t Make Any Sense.

To put it simply, creating backups of your site with a WordPress plugin is just not a very good idea. There are a lot of popular backup plugins on the market, both free and commercial, but all of them depend on things that can fail in countless ways.

A backup plugin has to depend on your server, PHP, your database, WordPress, and in many cases additional WordPress plugins. Because of this they will never be a bulletproof backup solution. Using them might make you might feel safer, but you’ll probably wind up feeling pretty lousy when your site needs to be restored.

There’s just no replacement for a consistent off-site backup that can be easily restored. With VaultPress, one click and a couple minutes of waiting is all it will take to bring your site back online if it’s ever lost for any reason. To me, that makes it more than worth every penny.

Best WordPress Plugins for Migrating Sites

WP Migrate DB Pro really streamlines the process of moving a database and your media library from location to another. It’s incredibly slick and the way the Delicious Brains team has simplified such a complex process is impressive.

We’ve all been faced with the task of moving a site from one web host to another (if you haven’t, you’re lucky!), or even from a remote server to our local development environment. Moving the database and files back and forth can be a real chore, unless you’ve got the right tool for the job. WP Migrate DB Pro is that tool.

Best WordPress Plugins for Redirections

Whether you’re running a small business website or a popular foodie blog, at some point you’re going to need to set up redirects. In the past, this was a pretty big pain in the neck. You basically had to learn how to configure a web server using .htaccess files or server configs.

Endless Regex Server Config Nightmares Begone!

The hours I’ve spent reading, writing, and testing redirects is something I prefer not to think about. Thankfully, you don’t usually need to worry about that anymore thanks to Safe Redirect Manager. Whether you deleted a post, changed a permalink, or made some other structural change, it’s extremely important to always redirect the old location to the new.

Before Safe Redirect Manager, there really wasn’t a good way to do this in WordPress. There are a few other plugins that attempt to accomplish this, but they’re either really old, very poorly coded, or both. If you need a plugin to manage redirects for any reason, this is the one you should use. Hands down.

Best WordPress Plugins for Security

Security is another area where things get a little weird. Trusting the security of your website to a plugin, which depends on things that can and will fail, is also not a good idea. There are things plugins can do to help improve the overall security of your website, but an “all-in-one” security plugin is just a bad idea that needs to die.

Instead of getting off on a tangent about the concept of security plugins, let’s take a look at some of the best plugins out there to enhance your overall security plan.

One of the best things you can do to improve your WordPress site’s security is make sure every user on the site is using a strong password. This greatly reduces the risk of someone gaining unauthorized access by guessing or using a script to break the password of one of your administrators.

That’s the Kind of Thing an Idiot Would Have on His Luggage!

Force Strong Passwords does exactly what it says. The sooner you enable it, the sooner you can stop worrying about your site getting hacked because of someone using 12345 as their administrator account password. Go install it right now. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

If having strong passwords is a step in the right direction, setting up two-factor authentication is a major leap forward for security. Clef makes it simple, easy, and even kind of fun to use two-factor authentication. You can create an account for free and start logging in with your smart phone in almost no time at all.

Passwords have almost become an entire security problem all by themselves. There are a lot of people out there who claim the age of the password is over and I can’t say that I disagree with them. Managing passwords safely has been a real challenge for us at WP Site Care. Clef is like a glimpse into what the future might be like. If you’re sick of dealing with passwords and want to make your site a bit harder to gain unauthorized access to, definitely give Clef a try. It’s pretty sweet.

Another easy security win is blocking unwanted bots from attempting to login and otherwise attack your website. BruteProtect, which is now also bundled in Jetpack, is a great way to stop most automated attack scripts from ever having a chance to break into your site.

Like anything else in the security field, it’s not perfect, so you can’t depend on it as your only security measure. Still, having it can make a huge difference in your overall vulnerability because so many malicious scripts are blocked by default. This is definitely one that I recommend using on every site you set up.

Best WordPress Plugins for Page Building

Alright… this is one that I struggled with for a long time. I’m still not totally sold on the concept of page builders in general, but I know they’ve been all the rage lately. There are quite a few competing page builder plugins out there right now and I don’t think this list would be complete without a recommendation.

I’m Still Not Sure About Page Builders…

I’m not necessarily in love with BeaverBuilder, but I do think it’s pretty cool. I chose it because it’s the best, most high-performance page builder on the market. It uses a lot of core WordPress functionality to do its job and the code quality is substantially better than most other page builders that I’ve looked at.

I’m not going to name names, but there are a few page builders out there that can seriously destroy your page load times, pollute your content with shortcodes, and just generally make a mess out of your website. On the other hand, BeaverBuilder works using WordPress core features like widgets and will allow you to keep all of your content should you ever decide to stop using it. The styles are fairly lightweight and are loaded only as-needed, plus they work with just about any theme out of the box.

If you’re looking for a sane way to build more complicated page layouts than most default WordPress themes allow, I think BeaverBuilder will definitely meet your needs. If for some reason you can’t make it work for you, then I really think you should consider hiring a professional. The page builder concept won’t solve every problem. Sometimes a little custom code can go a long way.

Best WordPress Plugins for Displaying Related Posts

Related posts. This seems like a plugin that’s been made and remade and then remade again more times than I can count. I’m not even sure how many related posts plugins are on the WordPress plugin repository now, but for some reason almost all of them are really terrible.

Related Posts for WordPress is completely different. Instead of performing complex database queries on every page load, RPFWP builds its own relationships and then references them for lightning fast queries.

The engine which powers the relationship building is very intelligent and will detect similarities in your content regardless of how you’ve categorized and tagged your posts. In addition, the plugin lets you modify relationships on the fly from the post edit screen so you can relate many posts to a single one for improved internal linking and SEO.

Best WordPress Plugins for Image Galleries

For the longest time the only real option for a robust gallery system in WordPress was called NextGen Gallery. It’s still extremely popular today, despite being one of my least favorite plugins ever made. Thankfully, in recent years a number of more modern options built using newer WordPress features have appeared.

This one was a tough call, but in the end the plugin that was the easiest to use won out. Foo Galleries makes creating and displaying image galleries a really nice experience. It uses the native WordPress media uploader and the entire experience is very similar to building a standard WordPress gallery. It has quite a few add-ons including a NextGen gallery importer to make migrating much easier.

I think eventually we may get to a place where this type of a plugin is somewhat irrelevant, but we’re not quite there yet. Unless the core WordPress galleries become more modular and integrate a few features from plugins like this one, there will continue to be a demand for gallery plugins. If you find that you’re having trouble managing all the media on your site, give Foo Gallery a try.

Best WordPress Plugins for Images

Working with images in WordPress can be a little annoying sometimes. We already talked about the best image gallery plugin which was created because of some core issues with the way image galleries are handled in WordPress. Things have come a long way in this area in recent years, so the list of plugins I still use related to images has gotten a lot smaller. That said, there are still a few that I depend on quite a bit.

Sometimes you just need to display an image in a sidebar. Maybe you need to link it to something or add a little bit of text to it, but other than that you really don’t need it to do much. That’s exactly what Simple Image Widget excels at. The plugin is a perfect mix of a nice, simple interface and basic functionality that just works.

If you need to display in image in a sidebar of any type, this is the plugin you want to use. It can even be extended very easily to do other things like create an image slider or a gallery widget, but it’s pretty unusual that I need to do that. 9 times out of 10 it works perfectly right out of the box.

One of the newer developments in modern web design is the concept of responsive images. Basically the idea is that you should serve different image sizes to different devices to always load the smallest possible image. Usually doing this in WordPress is kind of a pain if not impossible for most users. Thankfully there’s now a plugin that can handle it for you!

RICG Responsive Images will automatically use the included WordPress image sizes and swap them out based on the size of the device viewing your website. Mobile phones will get a small, scaled-down image while desktops will get the full size. This is just one extra trick to help make sure your site always loads fast no matter how people are browsing it.

One of the more well-known limitations of WordPress’ media handling is that when new image sizes are added or removed, your image thumbnails need to be regenerated. If you don’t do this, you won’t be displaying the correct image size to your visitors regardless of what settings you choose.

Force Regenerate Thumbnails is a handy little plugin that will rebuild all of your existing image thumbnails and delete any sizes which are no longer needed. If you ever change your image sizes in the WordPress settings, change themes, or add plugins that use custom image sizes, this is definitely a plugin you’ll want to have installed.

While we’re on the topic of image sizes, another common issue that crops up is users uploading HUGE images to their website. For the vast majority of websites, there’s absolutely no reason to upload an 8000 x 6000 image, but people do it anyway. Most of the time it’s because they don’t know any better.

Rather than wasting unnecessary energy explaining to your site’s authors why they need to resize images before uploading, Imsanity will let them upload anything they like and automatically resize it to the maximum you allow. This can be a huge bandwidth saver and actually wind up saving you some money on your hosting in some cases. If you have a lot of people uploading images to your site, I’d definitely recommend installing this one.

Best WordPress Plugins for Editorial Calendars

It’s no secret that we love CoSchedule. We published an entire post on how to promote your blog with it. CoSchedule really is a life saver for a mutli-author blog, especially when you’re publishing a lot of content. It lets you schedule and track everything from content-creation tasks to social media promotion.

Sometimes SaaS Just Works Better.

Because CoSchedule is a SaaS product rather than a traditional plugin, they’re able to iterate and improve it much faster than most plugin authors. They’re in full control of the system that powers the scheduling features, so they can make it better without worrying about 20,000 different conflicting plugins and themes.

If you need a way to keep track of who is doing what on your site, you won’t find anything better than CoSchedule. It’s helped us get our blog back on track this year and that’s made a big difference to our bottom line as a company. I really can’t say enough good things about it.

Best WordPress Plugins for eCommerce

I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole that is eCommerce, but I do feel like I need to touch on it for this post to be complete. Over the last few years, WordPress has really exploded in terms of eCommerce capabilities. When I first started using it, the only option available as WP eCommerce which, at the time, was honestly not very good.

Times Have Changed. WordPress is an eCommerce Platform Now.

Since then a ton of options have become available and even WP eCommerce has come a long way since the old days. Still, the one plugin that stands out above the rest is WooCommerce. There’s simply no comparison when you look at the feature set and the available extensions for WooCommerce. It’s turned into the largest growing eCommerce platform on the web and has even surpassed Magento, the long-time king of open source eCommerce.

I will say that WooCommerce does add a decent amount of code overhead to your site. If you’re going to run it, I really think you need to invest in a fast web hosting account. You can run it on a basic shared server, but you’ll probably notice that things aren’t as snappy as they were before you installed it. That’s really just the nature of the beast when it comes to eCommerce. If you’re going to do business online, you need to invest a little more than people running a traditional blog or brochure site.

Best WordPress Plugins for Membership

A comparison of membership plugins really could be a post all by itself. In fact, WordPress businessman Chris Lema has written on the topic on more than one occasion. It’s hard to really pick a “best” membership plugin because the category is so broad and people have very different needs for their membership sites.

That said, there was a clear winner in terms of ease-of-use and code quality: Restrict Content Pro by Pippin Williamson. None of the other membership plugins even come close to RCP when it comes to adhering to WordPress principals, coding best practices, and general usability best practices. It may not be the most feature-filled offering on the market, but it definitely has enough to get the job done for a lot of types of membership sites.

Plus, if the core plugin doesn’t do enough for you, there are a number of add-ons currently available. Pippin has been working on the plugin pretty actively lately so it’s a safe bet that the number of extensions and integrations will be increasing soon. Another reason I chose this as the best is because it’s easy to extend. Whether you do it yourself or hire a developer to build a membership site, I don’t think you’ll go wrong with Restrict Content Pro.

Best WordPress Plugins for Local Business

Google Local reviews are a really important part of performing well in local search. If you’re running a local business, you absolutely need to get real reviews from real people on your website. This plugin is a fantastic way to display reviews you already have as well as encourage customers to leave you more reviews on your Google Local page.

Google Places Reviews is easy to setup and can be inserted into any page or post by using a simple shortcode. You can also display your reviews in a sidebar using the built-in widget. Whichever way you choose to display your reviews, the plugin has a sensible amount of options and just enough styling to make sure everything looks nice. If your customers are leaving you reviews on Google+ Local, getting them front-and-center on your site is a great idea and this plugin will do it beautifully.

Business Profile is actually a lot cooler than it sounds. It’s actually a local SEO plugin in disguise. If you own a local business, you probably already know how important it is to bring in local search traffic. One of the best ways to help with that is to establish your website as the home-base for your business by including local schema.org data throughout your site.

Business profile makes it super easy to do exactly that. It’s a free alternative to Yoast’s Local SEO add-on minus a few of the more advanced features. I’m actually working with the plugin author Nate Wright to improve the plugin and bring in some new features like multiple locations as well. If you’re looking for a way to enhance your local business’ SEO, definitely check out Business Profile and keep an eye out for new features over the coming months!

For lots of local businesses, Yelp is the number one place their customers find them. This is especially true of restaurants and any type of service-based industry. Having a high rating on Yelp is pretty much a guaranteed way to get more business in your door.

WordImpress, the same people behind the Google Places Reviews and the Yellow Pages Reviews plugin have also made this fantastic Yelp Widget Pro. The options are just as easy to configure and the output is just as clean as the other two review plugins. No matter what theme you’re using, this is a no-brainer for any local business owner.

Since we’re talking a lot about reviews for local businesses in this section, I thought we ought to go ahead and include one more from our friends at WordImpress. Yellow Pages Reviews is similar to their other local business plugins. It lets you add customer reviews from the Yellow Pages quickly and easily.

Although the Yellow Pages don’t have quite the draw that they did 15 years ago, they’re still a pretty big player in the local world. Any local business owner can tell you that they still get at least some of their business from local business directories and the Yellow Pages is still one of the best. This plugin might not make sense for every local business, but if you’re really dialed into marketing your business locally, I’d definitely consider adding it along with Yelp and Google+ Local.

Best WordPress Plugins for Google Maps

Google Maps is a really common component for modern websites, but adding them in WordPress can be a challange. There have been a LOT of attempts to build a comprehensive Google Maps plugin over the years, but most of them have a lot of issues. Out of all the Google Maps plugins I tested, the only one that stood out was Google Maps Builder by WordImpress.

The Google Maps Builder plugin is designed from the ground up with the user in mind. Everything about it is simple, friendly, and easy to configure. You have full control over the size, style, and even custom map makers. Just about every option you can think of is included in the plugin and yet somehow none of them are overwhelming to use.

You can create as many maps as you like and place them anywhere you like on your website. There’s a handy shortcode and developer-friendly template tags if you’re wanting even more control. The one thing it is currently missing is a widget, although I believe there are plans to add one in the future. If you need to add a map to your website for any reason, Google Maps Builder won’t let you down.

Best WordPress Plugins for Testimonials

We’ve already talked about bringing in customer review from external local sites, but how about adding your own testimonials directly to YOUR website? There are quite a lot of testimonial plugins out there, but Good Reviews for WordPress really hits it out of the park.

It’s very well-coded so you can depend on it and it only has enough features to do its job. It includes minimalistic styles that ensure your reviews display nicely without adding a bunch of bloat. Good Reviews is a smart, well-planned system for adding and displaying customer reviews to your site. In my book, that’s all you need.

Best WordPress Plugins for Event Calendars

Event calendars… this was another challenging one for me. Just about every time I’ve had to work with an event plugin of some kind, it’s been a royal pain in the ass. Most of them are convoluted, hard to use, and even harder to customize. They’re full of features that only 10% of users will ever need which makes them bloated and confusing.

Event Organiser is different. I’ve been keeping an eye on development of Event Organiser for quite a while and it’s matured into a very versatile and useful plugin. There’s even a pro version with more advanced options like paid events, plus extensions for things like discount codes and data exports. The plugin is fairly easy to configure and use, which is in stark contrast to some of the other options out there.

In addition to being a more user-friendly plugin, the place where Event Organiser really shines is when you need to customize or extend it. Unlike some of the other more well-known events plugins, Events Organiser is well… organized. It has a very easy-to-understand template system and can be extended by even novice level developers without much difficulty. It’s not perfect, but overall it’s a very well-done plugin with a sane amount of features. If you need to manage events within WordPress, Event Organiser is the first place I’d recommend you look.

Best WordPress Plugins for Podcasting

Podcasting is another area where there are quite a few “interesting” options available. Luckily, there is at least one sane option that really stands out above the rest. You may or may not know that I used to run a little podcast called WP Bacon not too long ago and I fully depended on Seriously Simple Podcasting to run the site. It’s gotten even better since I used it and now includes just about any feature a serious podcaster could want.

Seriously Simple Podcasting will automatically generate your iTunes RSS feed for you, insert your podcast player directly into your post content, and allow you to host your audio files either directly on the site or at a 3rd party service like Amazon Web Services or Libsyn.

Because the plugin is lightweight and well-coded, it’s also really easy to customize. I have some first hand experience with extending this plugin and I can tell you that it’s about as easy as it gets. You can even roll your own custom player if you like since it uses the built-in WordPress audio player to handle playback.

Best WordPress Plugins for Music Players

One area in WordPress that hasn’t received a ton of attention is audio. WordPress does a fairly good job at handling audio out of the box, but it does leave a bit to be desired. Luckily, our good friends over at AudioTheme specialize in pushing WordPress to the limits of what’s possible when it comes to audio.

Cue is a really cool little plugin that makes adding audio playlists to your site as easy as adding a standard WordPress media gallery. If you’re a musician, artist, podcaster, or public speaker, Cue can be an extremely valuable addition to your web presence.

If you want to step things up another level, AudioTheme also creates niche WordPress themes geared specifically towards people in the music industry. If that sounds up your alley, definitely check them out. Their products are top notch.

Best WordPress Plugins for Custom Fields

This one is more for developers and technically-inclined site builders. One of the major advances in WordPress during recent years is the advent of building custom layouts and templates using custom meta data. The most popular plugin to do this sort of thing is called Advanced Custom Fields. ACF is a nice plugin and has a very clean user interface, but it’s also had some instability and data loss problems over the years.

ACF is Pretty, But Custom Field Suite is a Workhorse.

While ACF has continued to grow, add features, and move through a few shaky updates, Custom Field Suite has improved the core features and kept things lightweight, fast, and incredibly stable. If you build a site on Custom Field Suite you can depend on it. You won’t need to worry about an update breaking sites or costing you time and money.

If you’re looking for a way to build a complex WordPress website with lots of unique layouts and you’re comfortable writing a bit of HTML and PHP, look no further than Custom Field Suite. It has all the tools you’ll need to build an awesome site that will stand the test of time.

Best WordPress Plugins for Site Search

If you’ve ever read our blog before, this one should be really obvious. We really do think SearchWP is the best WordPress search plugin on the market. I’ve used it on quite a few site builds over the years and it’s always come through with flying colors.

SearchWP replaces the default WordPress search engine with a much more accurate search that you can dial in exactly how you want. It also allows you to create custom supplemental search engines to search for specific things within your site. We even used it to make a WordPress image search a while back.

With all that plus a ton of really useful add-ons and integrations, there’s really no comparison. SearchWP blows the default search out of the water and stands head and shoulders above any of the other WordPress search plugins available today. If you don’t already have a license, I’m not really sure what you’re waiting for. Go buy it!

Best WordPress Plugins for Content Management

A big part of running a WordPress site involves managing content. The more content you produce, the harder keeping everything organized can get. It’s becoming pretty typical for modern WordPress sites have 100’s of posts, multiple custom post types, and who knows how many pages. It can all get a bit overwhelming, but there are some plugins out there to make things easier.

Let’s face it. The WordPress admin interface isn’t that great. There’s been some progress in updating it and making it more modern, but in a lot of ways it’s still stuck in yesterday. One of the most annoying issues that I’ve come across is that the posts edit screen, the one with all the admin column data, is always either extremely cluttered or lacking important information.

Custom Admin Columns Are No Longer Only for Coders.

Since I know how to code, I can take care of this issue by creating custom admin columns on a case-by-case basis. I even wrote a small plugin to clean up some of the mess that the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin adds. But what about everyone who can’t code? Before Admin Columns was released, they were pretty much stuck with whatever WordPress and their plugin authors gave them. Not anymore!

Now you can add, remove, reorder and customize nearly every aspect of your admin screens just by changing some settings. On a smaller site this kind of thing might not be a huge deal, but on larger sites with lots of different data types a well-organized admin panel can make a HUGE difference. If you find yourself getting lost in the WordPress admin panel, give this plugin a try for sure.

Sometimes you just need to copy one item to another. While I’ll never recommend adding duplicate content to your site, it is very common to have similar content on a lot of different types of sites. You might be setting up PPC landing pages or service description pages, or 100s of other possibilities that follow a similar content structure.

If you’re anything like me, it’s a heck of a lot easier to edit existing content than it is to keep starting over from scratch again and again. With Duplicate Post you can write one boilerplate piece of content and then clone it again and again until you’re finished. It’s not useful on every site, but definitely comes in handy from time to time.

Internal links are important. Very, very important. Linking from one page to another within your content is critical to making your site as SEO-friendly as possible. WordPress makes this pretty easy by allowing you to search your existing content when adding a link in the editor. Unfortunately, on larger sites the amount of results that you’ll get back when searching can be extremely overwhelming. Better Internal Link Search fixes this issue, plus a whole lot more.

In addition to making the link search more accurate, this plugin also includes some really handy features such as being able to search draft posts, find links to taxonomy archives, and even search some predefined external sites by using search modifiers. Looking for some reference material on Wikipedia? No problem! Just add -wikipedia to your search query and you’ll find exactly what you’re looking for. This is must-have for just about any WordPress website.

Did you know that WordPres has a built-in system for controlling the order of hierarchical post types like pages? Normally the only way to control it from the admin is by changing the order number in the “Page Attributes” metabox that displays on the page edit screen. As you might guess, doing that can get pretty tedious, but Simple Page Ordering makes it… well, simple.

With Simple Page Ordering installed, you can actually drag and drop to sort any of the hierarchical post types on your website. This is particularly useful when you have custom post types to display things like testimonials, staff members, or portfolio projects. With everything set up correctly, you can just drag and drop in the admin to change the order things are displayed on the front-end of your website. It’s really handy on more complex sites.

Do you ever get sick of answering the same questions over and over again? If you run a WordPress site with a lot of users, I’m sure you probably do. This handy plugin from Mark Jaquith was an easy choice for the best WordPress plugins because it allows you to create your own custom documentation for just about anything.

Didn’t I Just Tell Him How to Do This Yesterday…??

Whether it’s instructions for adding a certain type of content to the site or guidelines on how to format different types of content, WP Help can make quick work of setting up internal documentation. It’s especially helpful on multisite networks because the documentation can be synced across as many sites as you like.

If you’re looking for a way to keep your site’s users educated, install WP Help and give it a try. It’s pretty intuitive so you should be creating killer docs in no time.

Best WordPress Plugins for Front End Editing

The concept of front-end editing in WordPress is fairly recent. Basically the idea is that you write your posts and pages directly on the front end of your website rather than from inside the WordPress admin panel. There have been a few different approaches to doing this from a number of different developers and companies, but out of all the ones I’ve tried Editus is the most promising.

In addition to being able to perform all the normal editing functions in real time, Editus also has integrated support for Nick’s other plugin Aesop Story Engine. If you combine the two plugins together, you get an even better experience as you can build out really dynamic imagery and storytelling mechanics without ever entering the WordPress admin panel.

Editus is still in beta, so not everything is 100% finished yet, although the plugin is very stable and works without any issues. Nick Haskins has put a ton of time, thought, and effort into how Editus should work and you can really tell while using it. If you find the normal process of writing in WordPress to be less-than-exciting, grab a copy of Editus and breathe some new life into your blogging experience.

Best WordPress Plugins for Replacing Sidebars

Contextual sidebars is something that I’ve been advocating for as long as I can remember. Using different sidebars for different sections of your website is a great way to enhance your SEO, make your email opt-in forms more compelling, and just generally improve the user experience of your website.

Contextual Sidebars Sound Cool, But What the Heck Are They?

The idea of contextual sidebars has been one of those things that I try to explain to people and they look at me like I’m crazy. The main issue was that implementing contextual sidebars required custom code and it sounded really complicated when I explained it out loud. There just weren’t any good plugins to replace widget areas contextually throughout your site. The few attempts that have been made just weren’t robust enough to do the job, but that’s finally changed with Content Aware Sidebars.

This is a really powerful plugin that can be used in a lot of different ways. The easiest example is to replace the default sidebar on contact page with one that has contact information instead of blog posts or a contact form. Another would be to use a different sidebar in every category throughout your blog to improve your internal linking for SEO. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea. Suffice it to say, this is really cool plugin and you should definitely give it a try.

Best WordPress Plugins for Battling Spam

One of the biggest issues with WordPress comments is spam. Whether your blog is fairly new or has been running for years, you’re going to attract more than your fair share of spam bots. There are a lot of spam blocking plugins out there, but in my opinion you won’t find one better than Akismet.

Akismet Might Lose a Battle or Two, But It’ll Win the War.

It’s true that Akismet goes through up and down periods of effectiveness. This is because spam is always changing. As blocking techniques improve, spammers adapt and change their methods to get around them. When the spammers are winning, you might notice that Akismet misses a bit of spam or starts being overzealous and marking legit comments as spam. This doesn’t mean the plugin sucks.

A lot of people will give up at the first sight of problems and switch to another anti-spam plugin because it’s more effective in the short term. The problem with this is that while these other plugins might work for a time, it’s only because they’re unpopular. As soon as a popular site implements the plugin you’re using, spammers will crack it and your site will be hit with a massive wave of spam. Aksimet on the other hand will continue to adapt and continue to be effective in the long term. I see this as the better option, but the choice is yours to make.

Best WordPress Plugins for Comments

Now that we’ve dealt with spam, let’s talk about comments. Comments are the lifeblood of any blog. They’re your community and your chance to really build a relationship with your readers. There’s been a recent trend to disable comments and push the conversation to social sites like Twitter, but I really don’t think this is a good idea for most publishers.

The WordPress comment system is pretty robust by default, but lets take a look at some plugins that provide little enhancements to make it even better.

Commenter emails is a handy little tool that will allow you to export a list of the emails of everyone who has left a comment on your blog. This can be useful for a lot of different things like creating a new segment of your email list to send more personalized emails to people who have left comments. You could also use the emails to find your blog commenters and add them on social media.

There are plenty of creative ways you could use the export, just be careful. You don’t want to start sending email directly to this list because they never opted in to receive bulk email from you. Keep it above board!

Disable comments is a simple plugin that does exactly what you think. Most WordPress themes don’t include a way to disable comments on all pages, posts, or custom post types with a single option. If you’d like to have full control over where comments are allowed on your site, Disable Comments is the plugin you’ve been looking for.

All it takes is a few clicks to turn off comments for every entry of any public post type. You can choose to update the value in the database to keep comments disabled even when the plugin has been removed, or just use an option in the plugin to control things. This plugin is well-coded and has been around for quite some time. I use it on almost every site I build.

Last, but most certainly not least is a plugin from Pippin Williamson, Andrew Norcross and Tom McFarlin called comments not replied to. As the name implies, this plugin makes it a lot easier for you to figure out which comments on your blog you haven’t replied to yet. If you’re blogging on a regular basis, you already know how fast comments can stack up and how important it is to keep up with them if you want your community to thrive.

This simple plugin adds a new admin column in the WordPress comments administration panel to allow you to quickly see whether or not a particular comment has been replied to by the author of the post. It’s a small improvement that can make a big difference on large, popular blogs.

Wow. That Was a Lot of Plugins.

Jeez, maybe I don’t hate WordPress plugins as much as I thought I did. 😉 In any case, that’s my take on the best WordPress plugins around. They may not be the best for everyone or for every situation, but from my perspective they’re certainly at the top of the list no matter how you slice it.

Did I Miss Your Favorite Plugin?

Even though it feels like I reviewed every plugin ever made since the dawn of time, I know there’s still a lot of great hidden gems out there. If there’s a plugin I missed that you feel needs to be added to this list of best WordPress plugins, let me know in the comments and I’ll check it out. If it makes the cut, I’ll add it to the post.

I hope you found this useful. If you have any feedback on my testing methodology or want to know why I chose one plugin over another, let ’em rip! Comments are open!

Hello, I am a little late to the blog comment party but I was wondering whether there’s a plugin to instantly translate comments to other languages the way twitter offers translation for tweets? I don’t want to use WPML to translate comments.

That was an awesome listing of the recommended WordPress plugin. A new take away is with the redirect plugin, actually, I didn’t know this is possible as I experience this challenge for close to three months without getting the solution.

Now the Safe Redirect Manager is there to make the process quite easy for us.

If the the functionalities of plugins are unknown to anyone , he won’t be able to organize his/her website very nicely and effectively . In this article almost full percent of useful plugins to make site have been described . Thanks for sharing this nice topics here.

I have started blogging myself. I am trying to find out the basic problems that my blog is having and looking for solutions. Also, I’m searching for some basic things like themes and other stuffs.
I have read your whole article, I am looking forward to get a positive result after performing this myself.
Can you suggest me any basic idea that I might need in the future as a new blogger?
Thank you

Thanks for sharing great list of player but search on google Responsive HTML5 Audio Player PRO is best ever bcoz i have purchased and used on my site, very simple easy to operate, you can download and share song with social media friends, u also can create list etc…

Hello Ryan! How are you doing?
I am very much appreciated to find this wonderful stuff. All these are really very useful plugins. Sometimes back I have also found one amazing WordPress plugin called Avartan Slider. This plugin is a great way to create stunning image slider and video slider for your WordPress website. It’s core features like touch and swipe navigation, drag and drop visual slider builder, multi-media content etc. are very fabulous.

Hey Rob! Now that’s a huge list of WordPress plugins! I bet you have spend several hours writing this long and detailed post. You have included some plugins that I’ve never used before (Comments Not Replied To), which are actually very useful.
Good job Rob!

thanks for your article and sharing your thoughts on the different social media plugins.
Sure, the list of plugins and tool out there is sheer endless. But, when it comes to social media automation, in my eyes one of the most important points connected with WordPress-Blogging, you should consider to operate the best possible tool to effectivly organize your different social media channels and content, you want to post.
Anyway, for some automation I recommend you to try the blog2social plugin for WordPress. This comes with the opportunity to share your posts to 15 different networks and offers a bunch of options to save time and resources while promoting you blog or website.

Comprehensive List, Rob,
These are the plugins I think every blogger should be using and the best part of these plugins is, they are completely free so everyone can get benefit from without even investing a simple penny.

The Plugins I use the most on my blog is Yoast SEO, W3 Total Cache, Redirection, WP Product Review Lite, UpdraftPlus, iThemeSecurity and many others.

Thanks again Rob, for some of the plugins I didn’t know you shared with us.
Yasar

Hello,
I have started blogging myself. I am trying to find out the basic problems that my blog is having and looking for solutions. Also, I’m searching for some basic things like themes and other stuffs.
I have read your whole article, I am looking forward to get a positive result after performing this myself.
Can you suggest me any basic idea that I might need in the future as a new blogger?
Thank you

Have you forgotten Animation Plugin or just ignored them? I would never build another Website without AnimateWP. It makes you Site smooth, professional and nice to look at. I would be pleased if you add Animation-Plugins to your Blog, because most people are unfamiliar with it, even though it is “awesome”. I mean that it just works. I also tried Animate It, but it made me nuts. My recommendation to everyone: “Use Animation-Plugins, like AnimateWP, to improve your Website”.

Will state it at this moment: I loathe most WordPress modules. They’re ghastly. They’re inadequately coded, hard to utilize, brimming with bugs and security openings, and they’ll back off your site. Any individual who discloses to you generally is either misguided, being insincere, or has a ulterior thought process (like associate income).

I’mnot familiar with all plugins above but it seems like a great list. However, I am missing one page builder plugin and that’s Elementor. I really think they deserve to be mentioned here! It’s unprecedented and keeps geting better and better.

Unfortunately Clef is shutting down, but there are alternatives out there. There’s also Unloq: https://unloq.io/. WordPress plugin page: https://wordpress.org/plugins/unloq/. It offers 3 MFA options, transaction authorisation and encrypts all data in transit and at rest with users’ personal encryption keys. Plus, if you lose your phone or laptop, you can do a remote logout or device deactivation and your info is safe. It’s free up to 100 users/ account, and it’s an inexpensive alternative to Clef.

Thanks for that. Great selection. But as always, everybody has his own favourites. For example when it comes to membership plugins, i prefer Memberpress (Chris Lema as well).
When it comes to caching I use WP Super Cache. It is simple to install and works out of the box. but it allows foe extensive settings if you feel like it. I completly agree with SEO by Yoast and Jetpack. They just work. Duplicate Post is also amazingly simply.
For the rest I don’t have much use, because they are either already part of an existing plugin I use or my site doesn’t need it.
You’re talking about bad coding practices in many plugins. I wonder if there is a way to validate this without being a coder. Any ideas?

Nice post, you already had me attention in the first two paragraphs. It is so true that must of the WordPress Plugins out there are crap. It really took me some time to find out why my website was that slow… WordPress Plugins. I had a bunch of Plugins installed, poorly coded Plugins which made my website terribly slow. I really suggest to only install Plugins when the functionality is really needed.
On the other hand it made me really laugh as I read the sentence “The thing is, most of them are totally full of crap.” because right before your post I read some of those terrible articles. I mean how can one really think crap like this https://wpressmag.com/4-must-free-wordpress-plugins/ helps anyone. In general I don’t post URLs to set an article in a bad light but I really have enough of this kind of articles. Seriously this kind of information helps nobody…

Harsh words Marlies, but yeah I can understand you there are really some bad posts out there (including the one you posted) :D. Maybe someone should make a collection of all the bad “best WP plugins” blog posts out there haha 😀

Very nice article, thank you. I’ve installed several of the plugins you recommended.

At the Comments Not Replied To plugin page, though, I find this message: “This plugin hasn’t been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.”

Nice overview of the best WordPress plugins, thanks for that. I found some useful tools like for the search function, to optimize blog. You also list several tools for social media sharing, but have you heard of Blog2Social? I would strongly recommend it, because it really makes my blogging life much easier. I’m using it, because you can schedule and customize your posts individually for each network and then send them automatically to all of your networks in one easy step. That’s helpful to save valuable time.

Hi , very good this product really is valuable , already I used some programs to manage my e-mail list , bad best of all it was the mymail , integrate it with my capture page with my blog , set up with an SMTP ( mandrill ) and it works very well , and autoresponder sending messages arrive with great quality , it is easy to assemble and has a great all customization is very profissonal the way I like it ! is always up to date , the only problem is that soon the value will increase, I strongly recommend that if you are interested in buying a good autoresponder manager that works with a profissonal appearance and easily integrates into your blog including every post he already sends automatically email your list ! that’s fantastic , I recommend you see the plugin -demonstration before buying ‘m sure you ‘ll like it too !

Not too sure I agree with the marketing type spiel for “Vaultpress” where it states:

“A backup plugin has to depend on your server, PHP, your database, WordPress, and in many cases additional WordPress plugins. Because of this they will never be a bulletproof backup solution. Using them might make you might feel safer, but you’ll probably wind up feeling pretty lousy when your site needs to be restored”

Vaultpress itself relies upon WordPress Hooks which therefore means it requires your server, PHP, your database and WordPress but perhaps not additional plugins. (But if additional plugins exist and are the cause of your site being down, then you’re still going to be cream crackered if it’s *that* plugin causing WordPress to stop dead).

Another downside of Vaultpress could be argued that they handle the storage of your offsite backup which I grant could very well be on an Amazon Cloud based server with multiple redundancy, but it’s still a single point of failure not under your control. Who has your data, how else can you access it? How is that data archived itself?

I’ve used Updraft on my own and all my clients sites since it’s very early days and even my most technically challenged clients have no trouble operating it. That has the ability to specify multiple target backup sources with different points of failure given you much greater redundancy. They now offer a cloud backup service of their own. It’s reliance on WordPress, PHP, your server and database is no different to that of Vaultpress.

For the times when your site is really toasted and as dead as a dodo, the ability to perform a fresh install of WordPress, import the last known good database backup (along with all plugins and other related files) is the primary goal.
That can be achieved with both Vaultpress and Updraft. The only possible advantage of Vaultpress is the scanning of your site for malware given you the chance to detect the intercept any hacking of your site.
Even here, I prefer to use a dedicated security tool in an attempt to avoid the Jack of All Trades, Master of None. In the defence of VaultPress, their scanner is top rated so I’m not suggesting it’s not up to the job. And there is nothing wrong with having another Security Plugin in addition to VaultPress if you so decided (it doesn’t necessarily slow your site down with 100’s of extra plugins, it depends on the plugins and their functions).

I’m pretty sure that Updraft is the #1 Backup Plugin based on the number of downloads/users so I don’t know why that wouldn’t appear on your list but then I also accept your list isn’t exclusive and they are just suggestions. I would just urge people not to read too much into the marketing speak, especially when it doesn’t quite hold up.

Thanks for sharing nice post. I would like to suggest Blog Designer WP Plugin. With the help of Blog designer you can Revise, edit and reorganize your blog page. And also you will get many features like. multilingual translation ready, 15+ fifferent and unique blog templates, fully customizable admin interface, import/export, custom post type support, live preview & many more..

I can’t think of anything like that off hand. At least that I could recommend. Most directory type WordPress plugins are extremely bloated and overly complex. WordImpress has a plugin that will let you display reviews from Yellow Pages on your WordPress site (https://wordimpress.com/plugins/yellow-pages-reviews-pro/), but I don’t think that fits the bill of what you’re looking for.

Thanks for the article, will definitely be using some of the plugins listed. I came to the article looking for a video plugin, it is such a core website requirement I am wondering if the omission is because they are all not good enough? Any advice would be useful, just want to embed a video in a page that just looks like part of the page, rather than a youtube frame that ends and takes you off to youtube!

I’m impressed. Like you say in the intro “super awesome WordPress plugins!!” is quite a worn out topic. But you managed to take a much better approach to the topic. This has been the first time in a long time that I’ve read a post listing WP plugins with real interest.

Nabeel, there’s always a debate to plugins slowing donw a site. Let’s see if I can clarify real quick:
A plugin that does visual changes and adds another CSS Stylesheet might slow down your site. These plugins would be under the category of “design” and “layout” type-of-plugins.
On the other hand, plugins that manipulate function are usually not going to slow down your site. These are going to be plugins that are full of mostly php code.
Does that help?

Thanks for this great list, the one thing i was looking for stopped working . Frontend editor plugin Lasso link does not work any more so I am stuck with Frontier Post https://wordpress.org/plugins/frontier-post/. Not bad but could be better.
cheers

Thanks for pointing that out! The lasso plugin was rebranded recently to Editus because of copyright issues. It looks like the old site isn’t redirecting properly, so I’ve updated the links to point to the new domain: https://edituswp.com/

Hey Rob. Great, well researched list. Have you had a chance to check out zotabox? We offer a package of 10+ onsite marketing tools for the website owner including popular social buttons, popups, promo bars, chat etc to get more subscribers and increase sales. We have a wordpress plugin and also integrated with 5 email service providers. We also have robust and flexible display rules. I hope you have time to check us out soon. Thanks for you time. Great post.

Hi Rob, as you know there are many new plugins coming onto the market every day. It can be a bit overwhelming and the plugins a little underwhelming. I don’t want to waste your time so I will whole heartedly recommend zotabox to you right away.

Zotabox provides high quality onsite marketing tools for all sites including wordpress (with plugin). The website owner can easily create and change marketing campaigns on the fly without developer assistance. We provide common onsite tools such as promo bars, social buttons and popups plus other original marketing tools to help the wordpress owner get more subscribers, followers and sales immediately. Thank you for your time.

Hey Alkesh, I have tried Avartan Slider Lite in one of my clients website. It looks great. I will recommend this to all my customers and also looking forward to buy its Pro version. Thanks for suggesting such a nice slider plugin.

Very nice collection of WordPress plugins. It would be really helpful to any WordPress web designer. Thaks for sharing this awesome collection. I would also suggest one more plugin for redirection with some great features: Trash Duplicate and 301 Redirect

Hey ! Thanks so much for all your hard work and precious time invested tinkering with these plugins for your readers! Much appreciated, as I too have wasted-er-I mean “reviewed” several free plugins, searching for the ideal portfolio showcase.
My site is a beauty blog & makeup artist portfolio – imgs like: editorials, glamor shots, and some smaller res, cropped images that was all I had to start with.

My question being:
Spare any advice on a plugin thats free for my portfolio to be displayed by? {Anybody? Help please?}
ive tryed oh, maybe 8 or 10 “portfolio gallery type” plugins and…. ughh… just any help would be awesome haha!! Thank you so much!!

I ended up settling on Restrict User Access because there are more recent Support responses. It seems to do what I was hoping for. Combine that with Dynamic Widgets, and you’ve got a mechanism to limit access to pages, posts, categories and more.

I just installed W3 total cache, It increase my performance. But when i try to create new post, my post being indexed slower than before. if there any conflict in w3 total cache with any plugin.? or or its setting is wrong.

I’d also like you to have a look at WP Customer Area (I am the author). This is a plugin which is about publishing private content to the users but not oriented towards membership unlike Pippin’s Restrict Content plugin.

Basically, you can build areas such as:
– a simple client portal for them to download confidential documents,
– a project-oriented area where you can collaborate with several users, upload documents, participate in conversations, etc.
– a portal for say, a small school, where students, teachers, staff can all publish content towards others

You can check it out. Don’t hesitate to send an email if you want to give it a try and have some questions about it.

Maybe you have an answer for me about plugins. I´m searching now for a while for a plugin which allows me to administrate Authors which are able to write aricles just in a selected Category/Categories and these Authors have also different User Roles and maybe a option too for building groups

Just another question. Which Social Share Plugin do you use here on this Page above your Authors Description? This looks really great

Great effort you guys, Thanks a lo!!! Your comments on backups have got me to thinking. I currently use ManageWP.com and do full backup every day to a DropBox account with lots of room. I would sure hate to think that this configuration would not work if I ever needed to restore one of my clients. Any thought or comments?

Hey Art, hard to know for sure if that’s going to work out long term. I would just make sure that you have a solid restore process and test it out frequently to make sure it works and isn’t going to break if an emergency comes up. Thanks for stopping by!

Our team over at simmerwp.com would love to know what you think of our plugin, upcoming extensions, and the future of food data on WordPress in general. We’re still in our soft launch phase, and have a lot more in store.

Wow..thanks for sharing this list! Great collection! I’d like to add the Usersnap plugin as the best plugin for collecting feedback (from website visitors / customers / colleagues): wordpress.org/plugins/usersnap/

Great list of plugins, and kudos for going the extra mile and including things like the best podcasting plugin–which is definitely Seriously Simple, no question.

Honestly, the only thing I disagree with on this whole list is the Google Maps plugin, and that’s mostly on the principle that there is no Maps plugin that’s good enough to be called “best”. It’s like choosing the entry for “Best Time I Stubbed My Toe” on a list of called Awesome Things That Have Happened to Me! That’s one market that’s still wide open for the first group to really create something simple, reliable, and flexible for Google Maps . . . that said, they’ve been getting better. As stubbed toes are wont to do.

I like your response and the “Best Time I Stubbed My Toe” award title. I agree, I simply UnLike when a client requests a google map. Really? Your address should be good enough – everyone has smartphones for mapping out their route to you.

You make here a little miracle: I run a blog about WP plugins and all the plugins you list here are NOT in my favorite list!
The good thing is that you write about a lot of plugins I did not review so I will have to discover them 🙂 It’s allways interesting to discover new tools…

Strewth, Rob! That is one impressive list. Great work. So many there I wasn’t familiar with (head stuck in my own code the last 2 years)

I’ve always been a Types user for custom fields, but am keen to look at CFS. Was the ACF issue of losing data because of the notorious max_input_vars issue created by PHP changes that affected everyone with large forms – WooCommerce included? So was ACF unfairly tainted?

Have you ever done a list of the worst plugins for WordPress? If you haven’t add Buddypress to the top of the list. I installed this plugin thinking that I would allow members to start forums. Well, I was hacked by lots of fake registrations(over 100) and spam ads the first week. I immediately deleted it and spent the next two weeks figuring out who was a spammer or fake registrant and who wasn’t. It seems WordPress is pushing this plugin too as a recommended one.

Thanks! I was a bit dubious about the “dawn of time” bit … like how many WP plugins do you have from the 1500s? 🙂 But I picked up several good suggestions that I will be trying out.

As for other plugins to add, I agree with Justin that WP Migrate (free or Pro) is a must if you develop off-line. Admin Quick Jump is a great time-saver when you need to edit a bunch of pages or posts. And I frequently use Tadlock’s Members plugin to give editors access to Menus or Gravity Forms; much better than making them all admins.

The one that I’m really enjoying these days, though, is Piklist. I use it for custom fields (metaboxes), widgets, creating settings pages for the overall site or for specific areas, and for front-end forms. You can define custom statuses, create tabbed edit screens, add repeatable (“add-more”) fields, color pickers, widgets with WYSIWYG editors and images, and much more. There’s a bit of a learning curve, especially for non-developers, but their forum is very helpful. I’ve used it on every site I’ve built in the past year, and on each project I come up with another way it can save me time and/or provide functionality that would have been impossible to do on a limited budget without it.

Me again 🙂 Just wanted to get your take on what you think the best advertising plugin is, with geotargeting? We’ve had some issues with AdRotatePRO and I was wondering if you recommend anything similar? Thanks!

Wow! Seriously. I was wondering what you think about using WordFence for brute-security, login attempts, etc and why it didn’t make your list?
Also, I was wondering if you tried blogVault and if so, why you prefer VaultPress?
Thanks!
Rebecca

I’d also like you to have a look at WP Customer Area (I am the author). This is a plugin which is about publishing private content to the users but not oriented towards membership unlike Pippin’s Restrict Content plugin.

Basically, you can build areas such as:
– a simple client portal for them to download confidential documents,
– a project-oriented area where you can collaborate with several users, upload documents, participate in conversations, etc.
– a portal for say, a small school, where students, teachers, staff can all publish content towards others

You can check it out. Don’t hesitate to send an email if you want to give it a try and have some questions about it.

Great list Rob and excellent job by not mentioning useless plugins. I love the idea of Commenter Emails as never ever thought doing something like this. Undoubtedly, even if I import emails as double optin, it would help me to get qualitified list for email marketing.
Tweeted & shared it on my G+…

Not a bad list! We’ve used quite a few of these. We’re careful not to use just “any old plugin.” of the +30K plugins in the repository, a lot fail in many ways, don’t get upgraded, or worse: forget support at any price.

Rob, awesome list – it’s so refreshing to see a “best of” list where the author has actually used the plugins over time and is making recommendations based on actual experience, rather than the need to get another post out the door! THANK YOU!! I’ve definitely found some new plugins I’m eager to try out.

I’m interested to try out the Contextual Sidebar plugin. I’ve gone back and forth on using multiple sidebars vs something like Restrict Widgets where you have one sidebar, and widget-by-widget select on which pages/sections/categories they appear. I’m not 100% sold on widget-restricting plugins either (visibility on what shows up where is challenging) but the other multiple-sidebar plugins I’ve tried have been either very confusing for admin-users or have slowed the site down a lot.

One plugin I install on every site that you didn’t mention is Black Studio’s TinyMCE Widget. It allows admins to add a widget with a full native Visual/Text editor. I have my clients use that rather than a dedicated Image widget, since the full Visual editor allows for media uploads, links and everything else – and they’re already familiar with the interface.

Only other category I’d love to hear an opinion on (other than Google Analytics dashboard/plugins, as someone else mentioned above) is what you’ve used for automated image/video/content modals/lightboxes. I’ve used both Responsive Lightbox by dFactory and WP jQuery Lightbox and like them both, but I’m betting there are other options I haven’t considered.

Funny you should mention a lightbox plugin. We’re actually working on one called WP Featherlight. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of the others, but it’s super performant and does the trick for most needs. It’s still beta but you can check it out on our github page: https://github.com/wpsitecare/wp-featherlight/commits?author=robneu

We’re using it on our site here, so you shouldn’t run into any issues, but if you do, don’t hesitate to let us know!

This is a great list – I usually get pretty bored with plugin blog post lists, but you really did a lot of work on this. Many of the plugins you listed I knew, but others, especially the local SEO ones I had never heard of.

I’m also glad for the endorsement for the SiteOrigin plugin, I had a need for a page builder last week and it was recommended to me only by name – but your description of it helps me understand where it fits (at the top) in the pile of page builders.

I’m also happy to have found a better sidebar management plugin. I had been using a competing plugin, which for some reason would bring a site down occassionally and I’ve been on the lookout for a good dynamic sidebar plugin for a while now.

Excellent list and I know that I’ll be referencing several times in the future!

Very cool. We’re glad it was helpful. We’re probably going to be adding that contextual sidebar plugin to our own site too to help with some of our marketing. It’s really solid and something we probably should have been doing already. Whoops 😀

Solid list! A few of those were a pleasant surprise! Well categorized, too!

One plugin I’d put out there is Piklist. It’s a very solid “rails” like plugin that massively enhances the capability of developers. It’s not a drag-n-drop plugin for someone looking to immediately fill a gap, but if you’re a plugin/theme developer it’s a must-have. It provides things likes post-to-post relationships, taxonomy meta, settings/meta-box/etc. building (via code) tools, etc.. It’s basically a framework built to enhance WordPress without changing it. I’ve used it in 10 or so projects by this point, and I think it’s a great tool every developer should at least consider using. 🙂

Epic list! Nice to see some old favorites int there. I’ll be looking at some of the other plugins I’m not too familiar with.

Being a developer I sometimes find it difficult to use plugins as I often find thatthe plugin comes with a myriad of options or functionality that I (or the client more importantly) doesn’t require. Plus some of the time the “I could do that better / quicker / smaller’ mentality kicks in. So i generally choose the ‘simpler’ plugins that can be extended or templated to suit the requirements of the project we’re working on.

However great list – just need to find the time to go through it all! 😉

As someone who works very closely with Rob, we’ve benefitted many many MANY times from the “I can do this better” mentality. But it’s definitely a double-edge sword, especially when we’re on the client’s time 🙂

This looks like a great list! In the social section for example you have listed Jetpack, which is not bad of course but I think is too obvious, something like https://wordpress.org/plugins/tweet-old-post/ ( that we have developed) I think is much cooler and is not a hosted app like wp.com .

Thanks for the shout out on Google Maps Builder – We’re releasing a new version soon with some great new features but also some really good UI/UX improvements. Great post… one more category I would suggest is “The Best WordPress Plugin for Adding Tables” – we regularly have to add tables to pages, posts and other places you wouldn’t expect. We find there are many plugins for this, but only some that do it really well. For TinyMCE integration I turn to: https://wordpress.org/plugins/mce-table-buttons/

Although I know some of those are technically plugins, I think of them more as developer tools than actual plugins. I didn’t want to include anything that was too far out there for average users to benefit from it. I think the closest I came to making a recommendation for something along those lines is Custom Field Suite and I almost didn’t even add that.

That aside, I really haven’t worked with any of those frameworks enough to be able to weigh in on them. Thanks for bringing it up though, I’ve edited your comment to include links to each so anyone who is interested can check them out.

Awesome work Rob. When it comes to these “best of” type of posts I can’t help but think the motivating factor is either affiliate nonsense or equally silly link bait crap. This is a breath of fresh air mainly because I trust your judgement and value your opinion. (even if I rarely say it or, um … have never said it) 🙂

A very interesting article. Thank you for taking the time to not only write the post but also looking into the plugins code.

I must say I don’t agree with all your choices but in the main very fair. It’s a shame that I would need a spare $1000 to buy the ‘pro’ plugins and in the nicest way – just pointing out – your recommendation on wp-author-box-lite?

I simply wanted an author box at the bottom of one of my posts. As another programmer you would know, I just need to edit the page template for that post type and add the Author image, add the text from a 1 paragraph post and add a tiny bit of CSS.

We both know that this could be done in in a single file and in under 1k.

wp-author-box-lite (I love the irony of ‘lite’) however weighs in at a whopping 5.13MB which is VAST and consists of 430 files!! – This is utterly insane!! This is the sort of bloat that only Microsoft can aspire to!!

Needless to say I’ve uninstalled it and written this myself (in less than 1k)

Thanks Simon. I know not everyone will totally agree with me. I think that’s 100% fine and a good thing. I prefer people who can form their own opinions about things. 🙂

Author box plugins are an area I actually know pretty well. I did some serious digging for a good one when we were working on Compass, our WordPress starter theme and I was seriously disappointed with what’s out there. I wound up writing a small bit of library code into our themes to load a simple template file that can be edited pretty easily.

Sometimes I’m shocked by how developers are able to make simple things into code behemoths. I’m not sure how or why it’s such a common thing, but I see it all the time.

It’s so refreshing to read a Best Of post that does not list the same old plugins that every other list does.

Most of the time I think its just a quick and easy way to get a post thrown together and to make a $ or two from endless affiliate links.

Of course certain plugins do seem to appear on every list but thats ok if they are simply the best plugin (WordPress SEO by Yoast comes to mind) in their field.

I recently unsubscribed from a very popular website that targeted users new to WordPress yet despite this they constantly “recommended” paid plugins over similar free versions and always within their list were one or two of their own plugins which always felt a little staged and not really useful for their so called targeted audience.

Your list, on the other hand has done the opposite as after reading this post I couldn’t wait to sign up to your newsletter.

Really great run down. It’s refreshing to see a list that isn’t simply made up of some “hot new plugins!”.

I’d throw Caldera Forms into the ring as competition for Gravity Forms. They may be a bit newer but MAN is it nice, will be fun to see both continue to grow.

I noticed you didn’t include anything along the lines of optimization and performance (outside of caching) into the mix. Was this because you aren’t a fan of any solutions? Where do you turn for issues with transient/auto-loaded options?

I’ve seen Caldera Forms because I follow some of the people who are working on it, but since it’s still pretty new I didn’t really consider it here. Some of the others I considered are Ninja Forms and Custom Contact Forms, both of which are great.

The only other performance plugins that I’ve used on a semi-regular basis are related to database cleanup and optimization. In many cases I just do that through something like PHPMyAdmin or Adminner, but WP Optimize does a pretty good job.

I have used a plugin called Transient Cleaner from time to time, but it’s not one that I find a common need for. There’s also another one I’ve used to control huge amounts of auto-loading options on sites that are using too many poorly-coded plugins, but I can’t think of the name of it off hand.

What a great list! I can’t even imagine the time and effort you put into this.

I would like to request an “honorable mention” for my favorite WP plugin, Formidable Pro. It’s right up there (IMHO) with Gravity but isn’t as widely used. The ease of use is incredible and their support is out of this world.

One category you didn’t touch is translations/localizations. I’m running a couple of sites with WPML and very happy with it. I’d love to know if there is something even remotely close?

Finally, another category I didn’t see is an appointment booking plugin. This is like the calendar plugin group — convoluted, muddled, too many features that people don’t use. I work with a lot of clients who need to give users the ability to book a meeting online, so this would have been helpful. (Haven’t found one I really like enough to plug here 🙂

Thanks for sharing the link in the Advanced WordPress group on FB. Your efforts are greatly appreciated. This is one blog post I’ll be clipping to Evernote!

Formidable was definitely on the list of possibilities and it’s certainly a strong contender. The main deciding factor there was the amount of available extensions for Gravity Forms and the overall flexibility of it. Formidable does a lot of things really well though and I’m sure there are use cases where it bests Gravity Forms.

To my knowledge the only real alternative to WPML is called Babble and it’s a very well-built plugin. The main issue with it is that it hasn’t been under very active development lately so it’s likely a bit out of date and lacking some of the features in WPML.

I’ve found the same to be true in appointment booking plugins. I honestly haven’t come across one yet that I’d feel comfortable recommending so if you do find a good one please let me know!

First of all thanks for the awesome reviews! Since I to agree with you about the plugins I’m familiar with I feel safe trusting your opinion of the ones I haven’t used. You’ve even convinced me to give Jetpack another look. So thanks!

As for appointment calendars while I’ve not been completely satisfied with any I’ve tried so far I’ve appreciated features of the $75 business version of BirchPress scheduler enough to have bought their developer edition. They could definitely use a better time picker (one area where WPMU’s Schedule+ does a better job) and it would be really nice if they had a list view for appointments. But their version both consumes and serves calendar feeds, which means site users can use their personal calendars (e.g. iCal or Google Calendar) to effortlessly black out times when they’re unavailable they can also use their personal calendars to keep track of their client’s appointments without logging into the site. Other features tend to match competitor’s functionality. I can’t report on code quality the way you can, but the plugin runs relatively well even on GoDaddy’s heavily throttled shared-hosting accounts.

WooCommerce’s Bookings plugin might be a contender but it’s expensive, still very new, and unlike BirchPress and some others there’s no trial version. (Also unlike others you have to buy yet the FAQ implies you have to buy still more extensions to handle core features like confirmation, reminder, and cancellation messages.)

The rest I’ve assessed are more or less poorly integrated with separate subscription services for sometimes hundreds of dollars a year.

I think scheduling’s probably always going to be a tough space — basically full-on apps that still ought to feel native to the WordPress platform. If you’ve got the resources and time to assess other candidates I’d love to hear about them!

Really valuable content, thanks a lot. I missed an functionality though, that I can’t find a good plugin for. For a lot of customers, we like to clean up the WordPress admin screen by making editor roles.

For example: the chief of a restaurant should be able to adjust the daily specials, but we don’t want to annoy him with all the other WP stuff. So we created a post type for the daily specials. The problem is, we can’t find a good plugin that allows us to show the chief just this custom post type (and maybe his profile information).

Another example: A company with multiple divisions has different content owners. We want to allow each business owner to adjust only the pages, posts en post types in his section of the website.

What plugin should you recommend for that? Did you come accross a plugin that serves this needs?

There are a few different plugins that I know of to do things like this, but my favorite is Members by Justin Tadlock.

It’s both a custom role editor and membership plugin, although you can enable and disable either part if you only need one or the other. In order to accomplish what you’re talking about, you may need to add a little bit of code on top of installing the plugin just to define the properties of the custom roles you’re creating.

Justin does have some tutorials on his blog for doing this though, so it’s usually not too big of a deal. I hope that helps!

While I respect each individual’s opinions, I find it extremely rude to say “despite being arguably one of the worst plugins ever made.”

If that was the case, the plugin wouldn’t be as popular as it is. Yes you’re welcome to argue with me on that, as you did say in the post. But I think saying a plugin is the worst ever made without justification behind it doesn’t do much good for your readers or those who love the plugin you’re talking about.

I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. In fact, Envira Gallery was started with the express purpose of “killing” NextGen. Please know that any of my views on a particular plugin have absolutely nothing to do with the people who made it, only the plugin itself.

I don’t necessarily agree with you that my opinions don’t do much good for our readers, but I do respect you for standing up for your plugin.

Hey Rob – I appreciate the wording adjustment. And thanks for your work putting together this list. Someday, we’ll win you over 🙂

For what it’s worth, I do think you, and others, miss two things about NextGEN.

First, many people do like simpler, lighter plugins. I think that’s great, and I like them too for many purposes. The most common critique of NextGEN is that it’s got too many features. Competing plugins try to respond to this by producing lighter plugins with just the few “important” features. But these lighter plugins rarely achieve the kind of popularity NextGEN has.

That’s because many users actually want the features. Or they think they want a “light” plugin until they find out it’s missing this or that (subjective) critical feature. When they go looking for a plugin that has the critical feature, they find NextGEN.

NexGEN offers an awesome feature set for those who need it. That’s why NextGEN became so popular, and why it remains so popular today.

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Second, I think there’s a tendency of some to assume all gallery plugins and all user needs are the same. But there’s huge variation in user needs and in the intended focus of different plugins.

NextGEN is a very powerful gallery plugin. That’s our niche. If you just need to put up a simple gallery, and you don’t need the kind of feature set it offers, then yes it’s likely overkill.

But there is a huge swath of users who want advanced features or very specific ones that are hard to find. Again, NextGEN serves that huge user segment very well.

As just one example, most photographers still maintain non-WordPress websites on platforms like SmugMug or Photoshelter. This is because WordPress (including NextGEN) doesn’t even come close in terms of feature set. There’s a whole industry that can’t consolidate on WP because there’s no solution that offers a sufficient feature set. For them, the problem isn’t too many options, it’s too few. One of our goals is to allow the photography industry to consolidate on WordPress.

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WordPress is becoming a huge ecosystem with a lot of different kind of users and niches. Despite the growing complexity and specificity of user needs, there’s a tendency sometimes to force all themes or plugins into a single – often very basic – box. But the reality is that different users really do have different needs and preferences. As WordPress expands it’s reach, it can and should be able – via its extensions – to meet those diverse needs very well.

I know I may not convince you to love NextGEN, but I’d love to help you understand and respect why so many others do. If you want to chat, feel free to email. Thanks!

Akismet is a famous plugin but a lot of people forget that you need to buy a license for ceommercial use. I often come accross it on websites made by others that have just activated it and then I have to explain to my client that it’s not allowed the way it is used.

First of all, just wanted to say that this is a great post and also has a few great plugins that I wasn’t aware of already so thanks for the heads up!

In relation to this thread however, I definitely agree with Jeurgen that two-factor authentication can be a devil on the road. So many times I’ve not been able to log into my own accounts and a hacker in my home country would probably have stood a better chance!

The other thing that needs to be considered when developing sites is geo-identified ecommerce that forces people onto “local” stores with no manual override when you legitimately need to order and deliver in your home country.

Even if you don’t travel frequently as a developer it is definitely worth considering things from the perspective of someone using your site in another country or on slower internet connections, with no mobile access. It’s ignored far too often!

Nope, sorry, but I don’t have the funds to pay $10/month just to receive an SMS (or possibly not receive because I don’t even get cellphone coverage in the Atacama desert). That’s more than I pay for hosting!!
I wait patiently until somebody comes up with more sensible idea. After I had to reset my tablet (because Lollipop was draining the battery quicker than it recharged) I also lost the so praised Google Authenticator App – what a mess…
Anything which relies on third party technology is simply adding an unknown and incalculable extra risk! After I’ve lost all my Google accounts (established 2007) I’m burned.

This is a pretty epic list, and I am glad you put it together. Its like the list I use in my head every day, except. WP Rocket. My big problem with WP rocket is that they fail to acknowledge that they are indeed a subscription service.

From http://wp-rocket.me/faq/
“Does WP Rocket work on a subscription basis?
No, licenses are not a subscription, but a single purchase.
However, if you want to continue receiving support and updates, you must renew your license.”

If I fail to get updates unless I renew then you are indeed a subscription service. Updates are critical ahem XXS,.

Business Profile is a SUPER COOL schema.org tool that I also found this week. And the Author Nate W makes some pretty cool other plugins as well.

Thanks Joshua! Hmm… I can see your point about their wording. I think they’re just trying to make the point that you don’t -have- to keep paying them to keep using the plugin, but they probably should change that up a bit.

Nate’s a good guy and he makes some awesome stuff. I’m looking forward to seeing what else he comes up with in the future. 🙂

You bet Hugh. That plugin was a lifesaver when I was running my podcast. I can’t imagine having to do it with some of the other ones out there. I probably would have just given up and rolled my own. Keep up the great work!

Wow. That is one epic list and a serious amount of work. I respect your choices – this would be a fantastic place to start for anyone new to WordPress that is trying to get a site up and running. There is some serious gold here. You’re right when you say most of these posts are full of garbage. This one certainly is not.

Sure, Rob. WordPress Popular Posts is the best plugin to show popular posts in sidebar.

BTW, I just purchased WP Rocket on your recommendation and I’m very happy with its performance. I’d been using free caching plugins and buying a CDN was not not in my list so I decided to give it a try. Thanx for introducing it in your post.

Thanks Matt! I almost included Conductor but I wasn’t really sure if it falls into the category of a page builder or something else entirely. I feel like it’s something else, but I’m not 100% sure what to call it.

Content aggregator? Something like that? In any event, it’s a great plugin and it was a really tough call between Conductor and SiteOrigin’s. The main reason SiteOrigin won out is because it’s free and it seems like it’s the most flexible for the majority of “page builder” scenarios.

It seems like Conductor would benefit sites with a lot of different types of content that needs to be displayed in unique ways throughout the site. A news site or some other sort of publishing site would probably get a lot of mileage out of Conductor vs SiteOrigin’s plugin.

I hope that clears up my decision a bit. What do you think? Do you guys consider Conductor to be a page builder or something else?

You’re absolutely right, we’re in a different category. I didn’t mean for you to lump us in there 🙂

Content display layout builder — is the best term I’ve come up with. It’s hard for us to compete in the pagebulder space because customers expect us to have all of the options — good or bad.

However, once someone uses it, with a site that has lots of content — it’s a breathe of fresh air to build their layouts and let the theme dictate design. You’re also right, we’re not free, so it’s harder for people to just try us out — but I’m okay with that for now.

Consider Note (wordpress.org/plugins/note) for a front-end editor text widget if you ever decide to include that in the list. Devs could drop it into widgetized areas and allow people to edit content in the front end.

Like a Lasso, but for specific areas of front-end editing text/images.